"Food" has never been a genre of film, but after seeing Chef, you will most likely wish it were. Written, directed, and starring the multi-hyphenate talent Jon Favreau, Chef follows the ups and downs of a world class chef in Los Angeles. After engaging in a very public twitter spat with a food critic over a negative review of his restaurant, Carl Casper (Favreau) is let go from his job by the restaurant's owner. Trying to rediscover his passion for food, Casper buys a food truck in Miami and takes a cross country trip back to Los Angeles with his son, serving hungry patrons in cities like New Orleans and Austin along the way. The film plays as an interesting allegory for Favreau's own career as a director and his love/hate relationship with critics. Beyond this interesting meta-angel though, Chef is simply a loving film packed with humor and humanism. It's definitely not the most sophisticated film of 2014, but what it lacks in tact it more than makes up for in heart. Chef also has the distinction of being one of the best films to capture the pure magic and bliss of taking a cross country trip across the United States. For this achievement alone, Chef should be considered a major player in the 2015 Oscar sweepstakes.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
